Jazz Guitar Chords for Beginners: The Drop 2 Chords Challenge

Generally, when jazz guitarists comp (that is, when playing comping a.k.a chords acCOMPaniment), they don’t always use barre chords. Or chords with the root in the bass for that matter. To gain more liberty, the intermediate players will gain lots of freedom by learning chord inversions.

The result is often flying around on the top four strings at a rate of two thousand chords per minute … getting on everybody’s nerves while comping! But don’t worry: this phase lasts only about 10 years. Then you’ll move on. 😉

So, in this lesson, I want to introduce the most basic voice leading for drop 2 chords (also called voicings) on your top four strings on the guitar. And it strictly aimed towards beginners. If you’re already familiar with drop 2 chords, inversions and voice leading, maybe you should do yourself a favor just read The Advancing Guitarist (and move on with your life!)

I want to point out that I call this a challenge because in total there’s twenty-eight voicings, so if you learn one of those a day, in a month you’ll have mastered this. So take up the challenge, and write it down in your personal calendar. Take four weeks, use the exercises below and you’ll never play jazz guitar comping the same!

Drop 2 Chords: Not so Fast!

Get the PDF for this lesson here, it contains the 28 drop 2 voicings (including TABS) you will need to take up the challenge. Did I mention the TABS are included? 🙂

Some Theory: Cycling

What we are more interested in for this lesson is diatonic cycling. It means, basically, that we cycle only the notes that pertains to a key. So, our key now is C major, and the notes in that key are C, D, E, F, G, A and B.

If we cycle those notes in the diatonic cycle of fourths, we always go up a fourth like this: C, F, B, E, A, D and G. Notice how we go up a fourth from C. So count C (one), D (two), E (three) F (four). So the F note is a fourth higher than the C note.

Practicing the diatonic cycle of fourths in C major: Version 1

So, we’ll run the cycle of fourth between diatonic chords for C major. So, spelling the chords out we get C major 7, F major 7, B minor 7 flat 5, E minor 7, A minor 7, D minor 7, G7, C major 7. Please watch the video to hear it, here’s how it look on paper:

How to Practice Drop 2 Chords

Easy! Your job is to play the voicings and name them. Once you run out of frets, take it up twelve frets up, an octave, and keep going down, all good?

After you’ve been “full circle” with seven voicings, you wind back at C major 7. That’s the first half of the first line of music on the PDF. Notice, you wind up back at C major 7, but not exactly the same inversion of C major 7. Now, it read xx5557 on the guitar.

Then you start over cycling from C major, but with that different inversion of the same chord as your starting point.

Inversion?

Yes … for instance, those three notes: C E G, can be inverted like this E G C. The former is a C major triad, the latter is still a C major triad in what we call first inversion.

So for any 4-note drop voicing, you can play 4 inversions of that same chord. Any of the four notes can be lowest note (and that’s how we qualify the inversions), hence 4 possibilities only. Please do not mix up voicing and inversion.

The inversions are simply giving you one more information: which note is lowest.

The above can bring about lots of confusion, so just make sure you read it out loud a few times before moving on. 🙂

So, back to the example, the chord we started with in the PDF is C-G-B-E (C major 7). The second sequence of chords start with C major as G-C-E-B (played like this: xx5557). Both are different inversions of a drop 2 voicing.

For now, I would insist on you *playing* that stuff really well on your guitar fretboard. Try to sound exactly the same as I did in the video above. Don’t let the “puzzle” of the harmony (and theory) intimidate you. First walk the walk … then we’ll talk the talk in the theory section here.

Then of course, for geeks, there’s more theory right below. 🙂

Voice Leading Crash Course

The exercise in this PDF/video lesson is in “perfect” voice leading, because every note moves to the closest available note in the next chord.

Or, another way to express this, in this case, is that we have two notes moving, and two notes staying the same when we change chord.

Notice, if the “outside” voices move (top and bottom), then the “inside” voices stay the same. And vice versa.

There’s a lot more where this came from, and possibly an entire online courseon the subject of drop 2 chords, so I’ll keep you posted! Thanks! 🙂

Drop 2 is the New Black

If you’re interested in pushing this concept further (and learn extensions, comping ideas on II-V-I’s and Autumn Leaves, etc.), I recommend you take a look at this online course.

Hi Marc. Sorry about being such a pain in the ***. I inspected the elements and discovered 9 errors. Probably on my end. I copied the link address and pasted into my browser search and it worked fine. At least I have a work around now. Thanx for all you do. 🙂

Thanks, that is an interesting voice leading drop 2 exercise, harder than it looks! I guess you could also practice them on the other 2 string sets…Another exercise I’ve seen is to use the inversions to do ii v 1 iii etc. with drop 2 chords. What is Greg Amirault going to be focusing on, altered drop 2 chords?

Oh yes, the other string sets are cool, especially the 2-3-4-5. That’s exactly what Greg is covering in the upcoming course: more string sets, more explanations on how to get the inversions, added extensions (and alterations), and different examples of using inversions to “pivot” for longer before resolving. For dessert? The entire melody to Autumn Leaves harmonized with the chords approached in the course. Stay tuned! 🙂

You can do some amazing things with Drop 2 chords! Because they’re such easy to play voicings on guitar, you can be very agile with them and create a lot of voice-leading motion with them. You can also treat each Drop 2 7th chord as the upper structures of 9th chords—essentially, each four-note chord can act as the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th of a different chord. This way, you can get some really beautiful, rich harmonies from these simple chords.

Hi Gianluca, It’s worth exploring challenges for all sorts of Drop voicings, although some are more conducive than others as introductions to Drop voicings. Drop 3 works really easily on the 6-4-3-2 string set, but requires a few more left-hand gymnastics in the 5-3-2-1 string set, and then Drop 2+3 voicings get even crazier. But they’re definitely worth checking out for the different ways to voice the same chord. Maybe we’ll get to a Drop 3 challenge soon enough!